Originally Posted by flyingcrooked

I'm not sure that's true. From what I can tell, AC has more generous paths to upgrades than many ff/loyalty programmes. That probably doesn't make sense if they could reliably sell their J cabin. On some routes of course they can. But I think on many routes they can't. That would fit with them offering more generous paths to upgrades (J is used to increase average price paid for a Y ticket, and as a carrot to dangle to get Y shoppers reliably engaged in the AC ecosystem). And it would fit with the remarks execs have made about there being not enough Canadian customers with deep pockets.

One possibility, for example, is that demand for paid J on certain routes is not very elastic with prices, in the sense that whether they charge $5000 each way or $3000 each way, they'll get the same number of people buying J. (Of course, if J were priced low enough, there would be demand. But what I mean is that on certain routes there might be N number of people willing to buy J whether it is priced at $3000 or $5000 for each bound, but lowering it to $2500 wouldn't really increase sales, since the rest of the people flying that route just can't afford $2500, or don't value the lie-flat enough to splash for that.) There are lots of businesses/products/markets where this sort of pattern holds.

When we see a flight go out with empty J seats, we know that there just weren't enough people interested or able to get into the J cabin through cash J, last minute and bid upgrades, aeroplan redemptions and eupgrades combined. But when we see a J cabin go out full (or even be full at T-24), we typically don't have any idea what the story is. It is surely very route dependent. That EDI-YYZ flight is one place where there is just no way there's enough cash J customers to explain the J pricing on that route. (August is the Edinburgh Festival, so this is not a comment on OPs example. But J fares to/from EDI are always much higher than to many European destinations, but as someone who flies 12+ times a year into EDI, it's a very easy route to get an upgrade on.)